planchette.pariah + other poems
poems by Rachael Crosbie
planchette.pariah
ghost of girl flickering
like birds to light—
a seance.
you blame the shadows
frothing in the slow stream for losing her,
for losing what could be. crammed
with bream, the water carries
the wriggling the gloss of gliding
but not a conjuring, not intangibility
or things from fever dreams.
ghost of girl seeping
in low-lying land—
a mirage.
you claim she won’t become you.
knowing of these things from fever dreams,
visions scorched by flashing
sunspots, by feral divination
passing through a scream, a gleam
of something that wants to breathe
again, you leave
for ghost of girl of you,
filleted like a fish
by your hands.
•
Camouflage.Tethered
A dream about nighttime:
country roads fissured by rain. electronic waters that won’t slip
through fingers. mirrors in a bedroom
all sheltered by husky darkness, camouflage. I searched
for the coordinates to these places I’ve never been,
the reflection.
But dawn broke through loose stitching in curtains that were hand-sewn by a relative from the east who believes dreams exist to haunt us but don’t mean anything. She held the door open to her trailer deluged in the jazz song that conceived her & pointed me toward the spare room—
the windows bare, tethered to night,
and the bed hidden by a hoard of mirrors.
•
exiled
You stood on country with white cattle,
pestled sage. Slaughtered when the sky
bore a marigold moon. And pink petals
burned to blood of the husks—
cattle to be traded for fire.
The meat turned clay when you left.
You kept the eyes, like dried berries,
and wet capillaries still stuck
to your fingers like raw yolk.
You argued survival when you hacked
my bone from skin—white massing
in the shape of thin wood.
While monks kneeled in carved stone,
offering their bodies to fire
to leave the earth in smoke
like your sacrifice of cattle
and human to a god—to you.
Rachael Crosbie is the Editor-in-Chief & Founder of the winnow. She has a BA in English Literature, and she is working toward her MS in Publishing at NYU. Rachael was recently published in Mad Swirl, Chiliad Magazine, The Sigma Tau Delta Rectangle, Off the Coast, and others. Above all, she loves dissecting horror films with her fiancé, reading poetry and literary theories, and hugging dogs.